Attempt to hide meeting backfires

When a News Transcript reporter asked several officials in Englishtown and Manalapan last week if they had attended a meeting at which the future of the Englishtown Police Department was discussed, the reporter should have been given a straight answer.

The mayor of Englishtown did not return a message left by the reporter.

An Englishtown councilman said he had not spoken with newspaper reporters since 1988 and hung up the telephone.

One Manalapan committeeman said he did not want to comment on the matter.

A second Manalapan committeeman made a reference to a different meeting that involved representatives of both towns.

He has since claimed in public that he was misquoted in the May 25 News Transcript article.

However, if he had clearly answered “yes” when he was specifically asked about his attendance at the police meeting, there would be no debate about whether he was subsequently misquoted.

The News Transcript stands behind its reporting in the May 25 article.

Before asking each of those four elected officials if he had been at the meeting, the News Transcript had reliable information about which officials had met to discuss the Englishtown police issue. The reporter did not just happen to call the four men noted above by picking their names out of a hat.

It is still unclear exactly how many meetings there have been between officials and represen-tatives of both towns, or even who initiated them.

In response to a question from a resident at the English-town Borough Council meeting on May 25, Mayor Thomas Reynolds said Englishtown reached out to Manalapan to discuss shared services.

Residents probably assumed that the mayor was talking about the police meeting. We’re not certain which meeting he was talking about.

At the May 25 Manalapan Township Committee meeting, Committeeman Andrew Lucas said, “I thought that it did make sense to reach out to English-town and see the possibility of shared services, which could benefit both taxpayers.”

When a reporter from the Asbury Park Press publicly asked Reynolds to name the Manalapan officials who had attended the meeting, the mayor told the reporter to go ask his question in Manalapan.

That was a ridiculous response, much like the responses the News Transcript received, or did not receive, when its own reporter attempted to find out the same information a couple of days earlier from four elected officials.

Meanwhile, several members of the Manalapan committee said they did not even know their fellow committee members were holding such talks.

One person who deserves credit for being up front when asked about the police meeting is Englishtown Councilwoman Anna Palmieri, who told the News Transcript that her governing body wanted to examine this issue in light of the borough’s property tax situation. She said the council had named an ad hoc committee to study the issue, although she was not present when the police issues were discussed by the represen-tatives of both towns.

There may well be many good reasons why Manalapan and Englishtown would find it mutually beneficial to share some municipal services. The police department may be one of those services, but trying to hide the discussion from the public — which officials from both towns were obviously trying to do until the story hit the newspaper — was wrong.

If Englishtown officials were trying to conduct talks with Manalapan relative to the future of the borough’s police department without the police officers knowing about it, that was a mistake.

The sense of community everyone in this area professes to love means that very little business can be completely hidden from the public. These are still small towns and everyone is always talking. Some even talk to newspapers.

Englishtown’s police officers are now on edge about their future employment, and that is not a good way for anyone to have to report to work.